Carol Johnson - Absalom, Absalom!: MAXNotes Literature Guide

Some of the main thematic elements of Absalom, Absalom! are revealed within the first sentences of the novel. Faulkners themes of death, the confusion of the past with the present, and the inevitability of history are demonstrated in the very first words that he writes. In the initial image that Faulkner draws of Miss Rosa talking to Quentin, he writes:

they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it thata dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler...

Immediately the reader is told that this is a story made up of other stories: Miss Rosa and Quentin are not only sitting in an office, but what was still called an office, since Mr. Coldfield once had called it that. With these few words, we realize that the ghosts of the past will be important throughout the text.

There is also an immediate indication that this is a story made up of myths. For instance, the blinds are shut, not just to keep out the heat, but because someone once said that air carried heat. By explaining it in this complex way, Faulkner is suggesting that this is a myth (that air carries heat), and may or may not be true. The same goes for all of the facts in this novel: they are recreations of myths told, time and time again, by people long dead or nearing death.

Faulkner also uses many adjectives without connecting commas to stress the mood, as in this description: a dim hot airless room. This is an example of how he uses language and the tools of poetry to reinforce his theme. If you read dim, hot, airless room, with correct punctuation, you leave a pause between the adjectives. But, if you read it as Faulkner wrote itdim hot airless roomyou end up saying it as if you were breathless, as you would be in such a place. One of the reasons for the great difficulty in reading Absalom, Absalom! is that it is in many places a prose poem of magnificent complexity.

That first sentence continues its poetic description of the room:

which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them...

Quentin is looking at dust motes as if they were flecks of old paint. Again, we are warned that in this dead, quiet world, reality is in the eyes of the beholder.

Faulkners dense, modernistic style is immediately evident here. He is influenced by the modernist novelist James Joyces stream-of-consciousness technique, and by the poetry of T S. Eliot. Like Joyce and Eliot, Faulkner omits punctuation, uses compound adjectives, makes up words (like nothusband), and continually sacrifices clarity to the rhythms and cadences of poetry. Consequently, it is important, especially on a first reading, to read the text closely, out loud if possible. This will make understanding the novel much easier.